The Sisters Club

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  It’s embarrassing to admit but true: Sylvia did regularly clean the room I shared with Carly. In the beginning we tried to do it ourselves, but when Sylvia discovered we never vacuumed under the beds, she took over the dusting and vacuuming, saying she was worried the dust bunnies would give the baby asthma even before the baby was born.

  “I should have thrown that thing away a long time ago,” I said, realizing even as I said it that she thought it was significant somehow that I hadn’t. “That day you came to take me away from the apartment I shared with Eddie, things moved so fast, I just grabbed whatever I laid hands on, and when I got to your place, I guess I put everything away just as quickly and then forgot all about it.”

  “Oh, really? So, who is he?”

  There were times when you just knew Sylvia wouldn’t accept “None of your damn business” for an answer, so I told her all about the first night I’d met Porter at the Bar None.

  Then I told her about the time he’d stopped by the apartment I used to share with Eddie because he’d been worried about me.

  “He tracked you down?” she asked.

  “I guess you could put it that way.”

  “But isn’t that kind of…stalkerish?”

  “I could see where you’d think that,” I said, “and I even thought that myself at the time. But, no, it wasn’t like that at all. You know how sometimes you’re someplace public, like the library or Super Stop & Shop, and you see something happen, something that’s wrong? Maybe it’s a mother slapping her kid in a way that makes you realize that kid is getting a lot worse when he gets home. Maybe it’s some guy being truly awful to his girlfriend. And you think to yourself, ‘I wish I was still in grade school and believed in things like making a citizen’s arrest. I wish I was brave enough to just act, to do something to keep life from turning into a complete disaster for another human being.’”

  “I guess so,” she said.

  “Well, that’s what it was like. At least that’s what I think now. Porter, in that one night, saw the train of my life getting ready to fly right off the railroad tracks and, by showing up at my place, by finding me, he was doing what he could to keep that from happening. He was being the Good Samaritan. Plus, it wasn’t like he was a total stranger acting that way. I knew him back in high school. We used to be friends, sort of, back when we were young.”

  “So,” she said, “this Porter—is he cute?”

  I laughed so hard, I thought I was going to pee myself right there. It was just so strange having Sylvia ask me if Porter was cute or not, like she and I were two teenagers talking about the guys we had crushes on.

  “I don’t know,” I said, feeling the hilarity subside as a wave of sadness came rolling in. “I guess.”

  Sylvia had asked earlier what I’d been like as a young girl. Sure, I’d had hopes and dreams just like anybody else. But then, somewhere along the way, those hopes and dreams had fallen by the side of the road. How would I ever get back to that person I used to be? That person, but only better. A person who hoped and dreamed and wasn’t totally naïve.

  “It’s OK to be happy, you know,” she said.

  But I was tired of thinking about me.

  “What about you and Sunny?” I asked.

  Sylvia

  How the hell did that happen? One minute we’re talking about her, the next we’re talking about me.

  “You say it’s OK to be happy,” she said.

  “And it is. You know, some women go through life thinking the definition of a good relationship is high drama. I don’t know where they get that idea. Maybe they get it from stupid TV talk shows. But they think that, unless they’re fighting with the guy, unless there’s high drama every second, it’s not a real relationship. It’s not a romance. All I’m saying is, it’s OK to go for the good guy. It’s OK to go for the guy who can make you happy, rather than the one who’s always making you miserable.”

  “And all I’m saying is: What about Sunny? He’s, like, the greatest guy who ever lived, even if Diana did corner me at that party at Lise’s and ask me if I didn’t think he was a bit like Yoko Ono, being around all the time, and that he’d break the Beatles—meaning us—up.”

  I had to laugh at that, the image of Sunny as Yoko Ono. “Diana was pretty drunk that night, wasn’t she?” I said.

  “She was. But that’s not the point.”

  “Which is?” I said, which I probably shouldn’t have since I probably didn’t want to hear whatever she was going to tell me.

  “Sunny’s so terrific, if the idea of the two of us together wasn’t totally ridiculous, I’d go for him myself. But you? You’ve got Sunny, you’ve had him for months now. And what do you do? You treat him like he’s your sister. You haven’t even slept with the guy yet!”

  “Hey!” I was outraged. Then I was curious. “And how do you know that anyway?”

  “Because,” she said patiently, “the walls in the condo are very thin. You never go over to Sunny’s place, he always comes over to yours; he even goes into your bedroom, but Carly and I never hear any spring action.”

  “Hey!” I said again. “What I do in my bedroom is none of your business.”

  “Maybe not. But your happiness is my business.”

  “So, you think two people can’t have a platonic relationship and still be happy?”

  “The way Sunny’s in love with you? No. No, Sylvia, I don’t think he can be happy with you like that. Not forever.” She set down her ice cream dish, long empty. When she spoke again, her words were softer. “What is it, Sylvia? What is it with you? Is it so hard to believe a man could love you, want you like that?”

  And right there in the van, outside of the closed ice cream shop, I told her the one thing I’d never told anybody. I told her about Minnie.

  • • •

  “I think that’s the saddest story I ever heard,” Cindy said when I finished, wiping her eyes.

  “Thanks,” I said, at a loss as to what to say in response. People’s pity always made me uncomfortable. “It was a long time ago.”

  “That’s what I don’t get, though. It didn’t even happen to you and you’ve—what?—taken a vow of celibacy all this time?”

  “Hey, I’m Jewish,” I said, trying to make light of it. “We don’t take vows of celibacy. We just don’t have sex.”

  “But it’s such a huge part of life! How can you just give it up like that? And for so long!”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess that, initially, I did it out of some sort of sense of solidarity with Minnie. If she’d been hurt, if she was going to renounce fun, then so was I. I never meant for it to go on forever. But once you start doing a thing—or maybe not doing it—it becomes habit.”

  “I don’t know, Sylvia.” She shook her head. “Can’t you break the habit? What are you going to do? Go to your grave a virgin?”

  “I’m not a virgin,” I muttered. “I just haven’t had sex in thirty years.”

  “Shoot,” she said. “You should call up Sunny right now, have him meet us at home so you guys can do it before the damn thing falls off from lack of use.”

  “That’s not funny,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “No, I suppose you’re right. It’s not funny at all. It’s sad. You paid your debt to Minnie; you were the best sister in the world to her, you stood by her, you lived your life the way she wanted to live hers, just so she wouldn’t feel alone. Even if,” she added, “that way of life does smack of enabling.”

  Jeez. She was a fine one to talk about enabling.

  “Minnie’s dead,” Cindy said, “but you’re alive. You have a right to be happy. You have a right to be as happy in this world as you can possibly be.”

  “Hey, I’m the one who’s supposed to tell you how to live your life.”

  “What we have is called friendship.” She smiled in the dark. “It goes both ways.”

  Happy, I thought. What was happy?

  I thought over my life; or, I thought over it as quickly as you
can when you’re sitting in a van and the pregnant lady sitting next to you probably has to pee soon.

  When Minnie was alive, I’d been happy. Even if other people, looking at it from the outside, would call our life together “enabling,” we were happy in our own weird way. And since then? This last year?

  So much had happened since January: the business really got going, the TV show, my new girlfriends, Sunny. There had been moments that weren’t always perfect, and some had been downright lousy, but most of it had been good. What did I want, though?

  I saw now what I didn’t want: I didn’t want to go back to doing the TV show. There was a reason I’d been dragging my feet about answering Magda’s repeat phone calls, and it was that I didn’t want what she had to offer. Sure, she could give me lots of money and even fame. She could probably make me rich. But I didn’t want that, not that way. What I wanted was to just keep cooking, feeding a few people at a time, and never worrying about hair and makeup unless I was going to see Sunny.

  Sunny. I wasn’t ready to think about him just now.

  But my friends? I was very happy with my friends. Things with Diana may have gotten off track a bit, but I’d always be grateful to her for being the one who brought Lise into my life, not to mention Cindy. I never told Cindy—I don’t know why; maybe I didn’t want her to take me for granted—but having her under my roof, having her to care for had been one of the two greatest things to happen to me since Minnie died.

  And the other of the two greatest things? It was Sunny, of course.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Cindy said. “On Halloween, we’ll dress up and go out. And I’ll even call Porter and invite him, but only if you agree to finally tell Sunny your secret. Soon.”

  Halloween

  Recommended Reading:

  Diana: Between Sisters, Kristin Hannah

  Lise: Angelmonster, Veronica Bennett

  Cindy: The Bitch Posse, Martha O’Connor

  Sylvia: Love and Meatballs, Susan Volland

  • • •

  Chalk Is Cheap was hopping, cobwebs were festooned from the rafters, and the vampire was cute.

  “Cindy?” the vampire said, going up to the clown who was bent down low over the pool table to take a shot. The clown had on a voluminous white satin costume with big green pompoms for buttons. On her face she wore circus makeup, but she’d refused to put the red mop wig on. When she straightened up, it became obvious that the illusion of size was all costume and that the woman beneath the costume was very slim.

  “No,” the clown smiled. “I’m Carly, her sister.”

  “Wow,” the vampire said. “Even with the makeup, you look just like her.”

  “I get that all the time,” Carly said, still smiling. Then she jerked her head to indicate two tables that had been pushed together behind her. “The clown you’re looking for is over there.”

  The women hadn’t gotten there until after nine, mostly arriving in separate cars. Cindy was the one who had found out about the Halloween party at Chalk Is Cheap, which she’d read about in the paper.

  “It’ll be fun,” she’d said. “They have pool tables there and everything, and they’re even having a contest for best costume. The mayor is supposed to be the judge, and at midnight they’re going to announce the winner. The prize is—get this!—round-trip tickets for four to Bermuda and a week there in a fancy hotel.”

  “Georgia was enough vacation for me for one year, thanks,” Sylvia had said. “But, sure, I’ll go. The only thing is, can we go late? At the condo we get about two hundred trick-or-treaters a year. I swear they bus them in! Even though I don’t have kids of my own, and even though the kids’ll get plenty of candy anyway, I always feel like a dirtbag of a neighbor if I’m not there to do my part.”

  So Sylvia and Sunny, with the help of Cindy and Carly, had spent the first portion of the evening handing out candy to little princesses and little Harry Potters. Then they’d all piled into Sylvia’s van, where they met up with Lise and Diana, who’d each come in their own cars.

  Now the vampire looked over at the tables that Carly had indicated. He saw an older woman with short red hair dressed as a surgeon; a caramel-skinned man dressed as a waitress, muscular arms coming out of white cap sleeves; a woman with short black and red spiky hair dressed up in a costume he couldn’t quite make sense of: there was a black cape with leaves and twigs all over it—there was even a fake squirrel pinned to her shoulder—and autumn-colored makeup on her face including a leaf painted on one cheek; a tall woman in a Dorothy costume, complete with a red pigtailed wig and sparkly red slippers on her feet, that sat off to the side a bit as though she were part of the group but only just barely; and, between the surgeon and the leaf lady, another clown in a white satin suit with long blond hair.

  “You’re Porter, right?” Carly asked the vampire.

  He nodded. “Cindy said to look for the blonde in the clown costume.”

  “I know,” Carly said. “And I was going to go as something else, but then I couldn’t think of anything else that was really good. I mean, Lise”—she indicated the leaf lady—“said she was going as autumn. She’s a whole season! How can anyone compete with that? So I decided to just go as a clown too.” Then she gave him a nudge. “Go on. Say hello. They won’t bite. Well, the others might, but Cindy won’t.”

  The vampire slowly approached the table, like people do when approaching a group where they only know one of the people there.

  “You made it!” Cindy’s eyes lit up when she saw him. “I didn’t think you would come.”

  “Of course I came,” Porter said.

  Cindy rose to greet him, and, with the table no longer covering her midsection, it was clear she filled out her costume in a way Carly didn’t fill out hers.

  “Wow,” Porter said, “things have really changed since the last time I saw you.”

  “It’s yours,” Cindy said, patting her belly.

  Porter’s eyes widened.

  “I’m kidding, of course,” Cindy said with a loud laugh. “Kidding!” Then her voice softened to a point where it was almost wistful, like someone dreaming of a world—a normal world—that would never exist for her. “Of course, it’s not yours. How could it be? I mean, duh.”

  Porter still hadn’t said anything.

  “I’m sorry,” Cindy said. “I guess I should have told you on the phone. But it’s just so awkward, you know? What do you say? ‘Hi, I know we haven’t seen each other in a long time, so would you like to get together and, oh, by the way, I’m very pregnant.’ If you want to leave, I’ll understand.”

  “No.” Porter shook his head. “I don’t want to leave. It’s just surprising, that’s all.”

  “Here,” Cindy said, “let me introduce you to everyone.”

  But after introductions had been made, and Sunny had pulled up an extra chair for Porter, there was silence.

  “So,” Sylvia said, breaking the silence, “a vampire. It’s not like you don’t see a million of those on Halloween, but somehow on you, it looks original.”

  “Thanks,” Porter said eagerly, obviously relieved to be talking about something innocuous. “I actually haven’t dressed up for Halloween in years. In fact, the last time I dressed up, I wore this costume.”

  “Oh?” Sylvia said. “Do tell.”

  “It was the fall after I graduated from college. I was at a party in Milford with this girl I was seeing at the time. I don’t even remember now what I ever saw in her, because all we ever seemed to do was fight. Anyway, we were at this costume party, and we got in this huge fight and all I wanted to do was get out of there. But the fight was so bad, I didn’t even want to leave with her. Only problem was, she was the one driving. So I walked up to the parkway, still wearing my vampire costume, with a tallboy in each hand. But Milford, as you must know, is quite a walk from Danbury. So when I saw this caterpillar on the side of the road after walking the curve of the parkway for an angry mile, I hot-wired it, and I guess you could say I stole it.�
��

  “You stole a caterpillar?” Diana asked. “But I don’t understand. You stole one of those crawling little wormlike things that later turns into a butterfly?”

  “No,” Porter said. “A caterpillar is a construction vehicle. It’s a huge yellow track-type tractor with giant bands around the wheels. This one had a glass cab on top. Anyway, there I was driving down the middle of the Merritt Parkway—”

  “With your vampire cape flying behind you,” Cindy put in, laughing.

  “Exactly,” Porter said, “with my vampire cape flying behind me. I had one tallboy between my legs for later and one in my hand. Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy driving that thing while trying to drink a beer. I could only go maybe a few miles an hour. I was lucky, though. The cop who pulled me over, when I explained about the fight with my girlfriend, told me that his wife’d just left him. We commiserated. He didn’t arrest me or even give me a ticket, but he did confiscate the tallboys and the caterpillar.”

  By now Cindy was laughing so hard, she was holding her sides. “Oh,” she said, “it’s just the picture: a vampire slowly riding a caterpillar down the middle of the Merritt!”

  “I don’t like blind people because they can’t drive cars,” Sylvia said to Cindy.

  Cindy sobered up instantly.

  Porter looked puzzled at the non sequitur. “I’m going up to the bar to get a drink,” he said. “Can I get anyone anything?”

  “I’ll take another club soda,” Diana said. Then she explained. “I’m on alcoholic probation. I made a bit of a jackass of myself one night.”

  The others passed.

  As soon as he was gone, Sylvia turned to the others. “What do we have here? Another Eddie on our hands?”

  “That’s exactly what I thought,” Lise said. “Fighting with his old girlfriend, drunken revelry…”